]]>“If we had had 30 or 40 bishops in this country stand up and say, ‘I’ve made a mistake. I take full responsibility. I’m sorry, and I resign,’ we wouldn’t be where we are today,” says Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter. Watch our conversation about the United Nations’ criticism of the Holy See’s handling of sex abuse by priests.

]]>Despite having sustained a serious head injury some years ago, Father Andrew Greeley, who died on May 29, 2013, was a priest to the end. “We know he is blessed and he’s blessing us,” said Greeley’s niece, Eileen Durkin.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/05/31/october-7-2011-andrew-greeley/9665/feed/34 Father James Martin on the New Popehttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/03/15/march-15-2013-father-james-martin-on-the-new-pope/15239/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/03/15/march-15-2013-father-james-martin-on-the-new-pope/15239/#disqus_threadFri, 15 Mar 2013 19:30:31 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=15239More →

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Now for more on Pope Francis, we turn to Rev. James Martin. He’s a Jesuit priest, contributing editor at America, a national Catholic magazine, and author of several books including The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything. Father Jim, welcome, and congratulations to you and all Jesuits on having one of your own become pope. Does it make any difference to the Jesuit order, I mean, aside from being proud, will it make any difference, as you see it, to how life goes for you?

REV. JAMES MARTIN, S.J. (America Magazine): I think it will. We’re all very excited and very joyful to have one of our own as pope. I think it will help a lot in terms of Jesuit vocations. There have more articles on the web and in print about what’s a Jesuit in the last few days than I think in the last five years so it’s a great shot in the arm in terms of Jesuit vocations, I think.

ABERNETHY: Vocations meaning people wanting, young men wanting to become Jesuits.

MARTIN: That’s right. You know, more interest in the Jesuits means more young men will consider joining.

ABERNETHY: What about the Pope himself? What can we say about how being a Jesuit might affect him as pope?

MARTIN: Well I think it’s very important. Jesuit training, the formation program is very long. He’s had a lot of different kinds of experiences in terms of working with the poor for example, living the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, living in community and we can see that by his simple lifestyle and the way that so much of his ministry already as pope has been by focusing on the poor by for example taking the name of Francis, you know, recalling Francis of Assisi so I think the Jesuit spirituality and also his Jesuit experience will really help inform what he does as pope.

ABERNETHY: And what does it mean for American Catholics as a whole? Many of them have left the church. What can the pope do to help bring them back?

MARTIN: Well I think the most important thing that the pope can do is really just preach the Gospel clearly and boldly. I think, rescinding from some of the hot button topics, what brings more people back to the church is inviting them into a relationship with God and a relationship with Jesus Christ and so the better he can do that, the more people will come back.

ABERNETHY: But there’s no possibility as you see it of any change on those hot button issues, like priestly celibacy and women priests, that kind of thing.

MARTIN: Yeah, I don’t think so. Not from Pope Francis. He is very much along the lines of Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict in adhering to all of those church traditions.

ABERNETHY: What about giving more authority to local bishops? Might that make possible, if, if he could do that, or if that were done, might that make possible certain things being OK in one place but not necessarily in another?

MARTIN: Well it could. I think there have been some early signs by the way he’s worked with the bishops and treated the cardinals. You know, when he was coming back after his election, he got in the same bus that all of the other cardinals got in. So he’s very much a man of the people and that may mean a little more, what Catholics call, collegiality, giving more authority to local bishops. So, it could. I think time will tell.

ABERNETHY: And what about his relationship with the Vatican bureaucracy? Many people think the curia, the bureaucracy, needs a lot of change and a lot of reform. Is he tough enough to bring that about?

MARTIN: I can say as a Jesuit and, having heard from my Jesuit brothers what he was like as the provincial or regional superior of Argentina, he is certainly a man who can make tough decisions. He is definitely not afraid to ruffle feathers. And so, for those people who are asking does he have a backbone, the answer is yes. So he may be the very guy to come in and reform a lot of the problems that are going on in the Vatican curia right now. And that may be one thing that the cardinals saw that led to his election.

ABERNETHY: And, very quickly, the sex abuse scandal and cover–ups seem to continue indefinitely. Do you think there’s something that a new pope, this pope, can do to kind of get over that?

MARTIN: Well, I think that’s the number one problem facing the church, frankly. We can’t preach the Gospel if people see us as not addressing those problems. So one of the things he can do is follow the pattern of the US bishops in terms of putting in safe environment programs and really trying to just change the church, removing anyone who is credibly accused with a crime so I really think he needs to focus on this, laser like, in the first few months, if not days, of his papacy. So, I’m hoping that he really focuses on that really important issue.

BOB FAW, Correspondent: In Bladensburg, Maryland, the Catholic service unfolds smoothly, a comfortable routine for priests and parishioners alike.

But one year ago, members of St. Luke’s parish were devout, devoted Episcopalians. This is the first Episcopal church in the country to convert to Catholicism under Vatican rules designed to attract disaffected Episcopalians.

If 20 years ago I had said you’re destined to be a Catholic priest, how would you have answered?

FATHER MARK LEWIS: I would have thought you were crazy.

FAW: Under a 2009 decree by Pope Benedict XVI, St. Luke’s, like all Episcopal churches that choose to convert, gets to retain much of its liturgy and traditions, like using its Book of Common Prayer and Anglican hymns.

It also gets to keep its married priest, Father Mark Lewis, who is exempt from the Roman Catholic vows of celibacy. Father Lewis, an Episcopal priest for 10 years, and his wife, Vickey, have two children. Their grandson, Sherman, is an altar server.

LEWIS (St. Luke’s Parish): We left the Episcopal Church not because we were running away from the issues of the Episcopal Church. We left the Episcopal Church because we were running to the Catholic Church. We came to the point where we realized the theology of the Episcopal Church is what was lacking. The theology of Rome, the authority of Rome, the unity in the Holy See and in the bishops: that was appealing to us.

FAW: Former Episcopal priest, Father Scott Hurd, married with three children, also found the move to Catholicism seamless. He was ordained into the Catholic Church in 2000 and acted as the chaplain here while Father Lewis waited to be ordained.

FATHER SCOTT HURD (US Ordinariate): There is a real hunger amongst some Episcopalians and Anglicans for authority. It was the question of where can true Christian authority be found that was a key element in this community’s journey.

FAW: It wasn’t just the need for authority, say other former Episcopalians. They were also uncomfortable because the Episcopal Church approves of ordaining women, openly gay priests, and same-sex marriage.

STEPHEN SMITH (Congregant): There’s not any one real incident you can point to, but it’s like the strands of a rope giving one by one, and each one weakens the rope as a whole.

FAW: Anne Marie Whittaker feels that she didn’t leave the Episcopal Church but that the church left her.

ANNE MARIE WHITTAKER (Congregant): All of a sudden it was do-your-own-thing mass, and there was a lot going on, for instance, a clown mass. I would come in and someone put a red nose on me! I saw children circling altars. One by one, parishes started to succumb to some of these practices in order to attract people, and it made it difficult for me to worship in that atmosphere.

FAW: Under the new Vatican guidelines, an estimated 1300 Anglicans and 150 married priests have inquired about being received into the Catholic Church. To accommodate them, the Church has established a new ordinariate, the equivalent of a nationwide diocese. Father Hurd acts as its chief of staff.

HURD: I don’t see it as being a tidal wave, but I see it as a slow and steady trickle of people who wish to—who feel led to come in this direction.

FAW: And who feel led despite revelations of widespread priestly pedophilia and cover-up within the Catholic Church .

WHITTAKER: I was outraged with these, with the scandals, with the priests. And then recently I sat down and I said, “What about Penn State? What about Penn State?” Is this something that is happening all around? It’s not to excuse the Church.

FAW: But it’s bigger than the Church?

WHITTAKER: It’s bigger than the Church.

LEWIS: There have always been scandals in the Church. There have been heretics in the Church from the very beginning, and there has been sin in the Church. And as I said in my sermon this morning that what makes the Church holy is that it is the Church of Christ, and that is what I choose to focus on rather than the sinful nature of people.

FAW: Some Episcopal Church leaders, such as Bishop Eugene Sutton of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, argue that these conversions are not a threat and that many Catholics become Episcopalian.

BISHOP EUGENE SUTTON (Episcopal Diocese of Maryland): I like to say that we are really one spiritual family. We believe about 90 percent of things in common. Where we disagree is on matters of authority and some other spiritual matters. But the important thing is that we are not fighting; we are not in competition with one another.

FAW: Even though the number of Episcopal congregations converting to Catholicism is relatively small, the impact on the Episcopal Church has not been negligible. Indeed, here at Virginia Theological Seminary, the country’s largest Episcopal seminary, the president and dean calls the movement “a real threat.”

REVEREND IAN MARKHAM (Dean of Virginia Theological Seminary): There’s quite a lot of traffic currently going both ways between the two traditions, especially at the level of congregants. What’s interesting here is you’ve got entire congregations and clergy making the shift. So, yeah, I think the Roman Catholic Church is a threat, because we’ve lost the sense of our theological understanding and identity.

FAW: Dean Markham believes that among Episcopalians there’s still anger today over the pope’s 2009 decree.

MARKHAM: There was a perception that this was poaching by the Roman Catholic Church of Anglicans around the world. It was discourteous, it was stealing sheep, it was unecumenical.

FAW: It is seen as a kind of poaching?

MARKHAM: It’s viewed as not recognizing the value of and integrity of our traditions.

FAW: Conversion, then, is a touchy issue which newfound Catholics handle both diplomatically and bluntly.

HURD: I think it’s very important that this initiative is identified as a response and not an offer. You know, we’re not trying to steal sheep or to poach. We’re trying to pastorally respond to those who wanted to come in this direction for some time.

WHITTAKER: Let me tell you something about sheep stealing. You cannot steal sheep if the shepherd is doing his job, and that’s the bottom line. If the shepherd is doing his job, the flock will stay.

FAW: Whether “poaching” or a natural “evolution,” Episcopalians troubled by what’s happened at St Luke’s and elsewhere argue that their Church simply cannot sit back and watch.

MARKHAM: I think this could be quite a healthy movement for the Episcopal Church, because what it does is it keeps the Episcopal Church focused on providing a theological rationale for the things that we do. Too often we couch our changes in terms of policy or positioning on questions like sexuality, in terms of secular discourse. We as a tradition need to be as self-confident as Roman Catholics are. We need to be equally robust in saying, look, we actually think we have discerned what God requires of us as a community in the world. And we need to put our vision up against the Catholic vision.

FAW: While some Episcopal leaders have made conversion difficult, that was not the case here at St Luke’s. Under generous terms, this parish gets to keep its building. But however the conversion is handled, church leaders see little need to back down from where the Episcopal Church stands on social issues.

SUTTON: One thing that the Episcopal Church does that is very attractive to people is that we try to do two things at once, and that is hold onto the ancient past, We believe in tradition. But the other thing we do well is embrace the new. We do not believe that in order to follow Jesus means we have to have our heads in the sand, and we cannot be open to any new understanding or any new way of being the church.

FAW: For new converts, though, it is that very tension between embracing both the old and the new which has caused them to turn in a new direction.

LEWIS: It was a move to going to what we believe as truth and what we know is truth, and I don’t think there’s anybody alive that would know what truth is and not move to it.

WHITTAKER: It is going home. It really is, and it feels good. Everyone’s been so very helpful, and I’m at peace. I’m at peace.

FAW: Here where “going home” brings comfort to a small congregation and implications for the wider Episcopal Church.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Bladensburg, Maryland.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: More about the week’s religion and ethics news now from Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and David Gibson, national reporter for Religion News Service, who joins us from New York. Welcome to you both. David, out of all the tragedy in Colorado there has emerged another debate about gun control. Should it be considered a pro-life, a right-to-life issue like abortion? What are people saying?

DAVID GIBSON (Religion News Service): Well, this debate, Bob, was really prompted in the hours after the shooting by a column by Father James Martin, a Jesuit at America magazine, popular author, who wrote an essay saying, look, gun control and gun violence is a pro-life issue as much as abortion, as the death penalty, as euthanasia, and pro-lifers, traditional pro-lifers should get behind it in that context. Well, of course, again, of all the many debates that have come out of this horrific episode that opened up another branch in the moral and religious realm in our society, with a lot of people pushing back and saying no, abortion is the paramount pro-life issue. Anything else would be a distraction. So you kind of had an interesting paradox almost of pro-life folks who are arguing for restrictions on abortion saying there should be no restrictions on guns. And then you had a lot of liberals who favor the right to abortion saying no, we should have restrictions on guns.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: And it sort of highlights a debate that’s been going on among evangelicals and Catholics in particular about this hierarchy of the life issues. And we saw this also in the discussions between the nuns and the Vatican. Some people say if everything is pro-life then it really loses the meaning and that there is a hierarchy of life issues and abortion should be at the top and these other issues shouldn’t. So this situation sort of highlighted that ongoing debate.

ABERNETHY: David, another discussion or debate that came out of the Colorado thing was whether what happened was evil or whether whatever happened is the kind of thing that we ought to be able and should do something about so that it won’t happen in the future, that we have the power to act and repair the world if we can, as opposed to being helpless if it’s evil and nothing we can do about it.

GIBSON: Yeah, and Bob, it almost kind of goes back to the old faith-versus-works debate in Christian theology about, look, was this just a spiritual crisis, a triumph of evil, almost demonic possession some would say, that you really have no control about? This is “suffering happens.” Evil happens in the world. It’s about how we deal with that in the aftermath. Or whether, look, it’s not just about praying for victims and praying to hope that this doesn’t happen again, but also working as believers to, as you say, repair the world, to institute perhaps better gun control laws or make public policies that would prevent this kind of gun violence from happening again. You had a real fierce, really religious debate at the heart of this.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Monsignor William Lynn became the first Catholic official in the country to be convicted of a crime for covering up sex abuse by some of the priests that he supervised—three to six years he got. David, Kim, what’s being said about the severity of that sentence?

LAWTON: Well, you had some people arguing that maybe this was too severe. One of the priests that he was accused of sheltering got less time than he did, so there was some concern about that. But also in a week when you also saw the Penn State punishments coming down, there was some discussion about accountability, and is it institutions that should be held accountable or individuals, and who all is harmed? And certainly we saw with the Catholic Church there have been some concerns by some of the victims groups that there hasn’t been enough accountability at the top of the institution, and so that came out again this week.

ABERNETHY: And at Penn State it seemed like, to many people, like a kind of a blanket punishment rather than, as you say, singling out the people at the very top who could be held responsible.

LAWTON: Well, and there are some in the Catholic Church that would argue that a lot of people in the Church also ended up suffering the consequences of the situation.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and David Gibson of Religion News Service.

BOB ABERNETHY: As 2011 draws to a close we take our annual look back at what we think were the most interesting and important religion and ethics stories of the year. We begin with a reminder from Kim Lawton of what some of those stories were.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: As the gap between rich and poor widened this year, people of faith stepped up their efforts to help those hard hit by the recession. Some, especially conservative, activists supported massive cuts to the federal budget, arguing that it was immoral to leave debt to future generations. But a broad-based interfaith coalition argued that it was immoral to make spending cuts that would hurt already-vulnerable people. Thousands participated in a prayer and fasting campaign to protect programs that help the poor in the US and around the world. When frustration about the economy spilled out into the streets with the Occupy Movement, many religious groups provided spiritual and material support. Local congregations led interfaith worship services and offered sanctuary to evicted protesters. Theologians debated whether Jesus would have camped out with the Occupy movement.

The role of religion in American politics remained controversial. GOP presidential hopefuls courted religious voters, especially evangelicals who are very important in the primaries. Many candidates made explicitly religious appeals. While some concern about the idea of a Mormon president lingered, especially among evangelicals, issues of character and marital fidelity appeared to generate more attention.

In several parts of the Arab World, popular uprisings toppled regimes and reignited debates about the role of Islam and government. New political successes for Islamist political parties raised concerns about human rights and especially the situation for dissenters and religious minorities. In Egypt, Muslims and Christians protested side-by-side in Tahrir Square, but there were several dramatic attacks against the nation’s Coptic Christian community. In Syria, protesters were met with a brutal crackdown from government forces.

American ethicists and religious leaders debated the morality of military intervention in Libya. Some said US participation in the NATO action was justified on humanitarian grounds, but others argued that it did not meet the criteria of the Just War doctrine. The killings of Osama bin-Laden and extremist American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki generated ethical debate about the US use of force in noncombat zones. There was also debate about the growing US use of weaponized unmanned drones.

American religious groups were divided over the Palestinians’ request for official UN recognition as a state. Many Jews and Evangelical Christians opposed the statehood bid. But some Christian and Muslim groups supported the idea, saying it was time for Palestinians to have their own state.

The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks prompted new examination of the state of interfaith relations. Many Muslim-Americans complained of a continuing rise of anti-Islamic discrimination. On Capitol Hill, Republican Congressman Peter King sponsored hearings on what he called the “radicalization of American Muslims.” There was acrimonious debate in several communities over proposed bans against shariah or Islamic law. At the same time, the 9/11 anniversary highlighted many projects where diverse faith communities have come together in new ways.

Several humanitarian disasters stretched the resources of faith-based groups. Religious organizations continued efforts in Haiti after last year’s devastating earthquake and cholera epidemic, and they offered aid in the wake of the Japanese earthquake. Many faith-based groups mobilized to help millions affected by a major famine in East Africa. There were also challenges here at home with deadly tornados, severe flooding, and a rare East Coast earthquake that caused as estimated $15 million dollars’ worth of damage at Washington National Cathedral.

But 2011 brought some occasions for celebration as well. Christians commemorated the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. And in Rome, on a record-breaking timetable, Pope John Paul the Second was beatified, bringing him one step closer to sainthood.

ABERNETHY: Kim a great summary. Kim Lawton is managing editor of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Kevin Eckstrom is the Editor-in-Chief of Religion News Service and E.J. Dionne is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist for the Washington Post and a professor at Georgetown University. Welcome to each of you.

ALL: Thank you.

ABERNETHY: I guess my pick for the year would be the Arab Spring and everything that flowed out of it leading to the Occupy Movement all over the United States. E.J. what do you make of that?

E.J. DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): Well I think the Arab Spring is one of those events that could have longest term impact on the nature of the world. I mean when you’re thinking about how many Arab and Muslim countries were transformed by this. We don’t know where this is going yet, but it was striking that this movement was a very broad alliance of people some who were Islamists, some who were secular, some from the Christian minority all saying we’re sick and tired of corruption and dictatorship. Now, it’s playing out differently in different places, we don’t know where it’s going but it sure was a very liberating moment. I’m not sure it led to the Occupy Wall Street, although some of the Occupy Wall Streeters talked about an inspiration, but it was a year in which protestors of a lot of different kinds changed the world.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And it really did bring up this whole question about when you have a democracy then what is the role of religion? And many countries obviously have been wrestling with this, we wrestle with it, but in Islamic countries that’s a question and how do you form a new government, write a constitution that acknowledges Islam but then what does that mean in terms of the laws and the people and the treatment of minorities and women. And so all of those issues are being debated and people are watching because there are a lot of Muslims countries that, that have been struggling with this issue.

ABERNETHY: And the irony that democracy might lead to a lot of things that we don’t like.

DIONNE: Right and I think Kim put her finger on something, which is you know we’ve had Christian democratic movements in western countries for a long time where there was some kind of linkage with, between religion and the state and yet an acknowledgement of the importance of religious freedom and democracy. There are religious parties inside Israel that compete with secular parties and so the real question, or one of the real questions is whether similar developments will take place in Arab world, in the Arab world and I think and we’ve seen certainly in countries like Indonesia where you can have parties that are Islamic but also democratic.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Religion News Service, Editor-in-Chief): And I think what’s interesting here at home on the Occupy movement was it’s not a religious movement per say, although there has been religious involvement, but it prompted a lot of really heavy religious and moral arguments about fairness and equity and how we spread wealth or how we hold people accountable. And so there for some fairly profound, I think, moral questions that were raised by the Occupy movement.

ABERNETHY: And E.J. a year ago we were all preoccupied with the Tea Party movement the year passed and we are all preoccupied on the left with the Occupy movement. What happened?

DIONNE: Well I think what the two movements had in common is that a lot of people in the country are unhappy with the results of the economic downturn on the state of the economy right through the 2010 election the inclination, the strongest organizing was on the side that said this is all the government’s fault and we have to tear down government. I think Occupy really changed our political debate in fundamental ways. A lot of people had been talking about rising economic inequality, which has really been happening over a 30 or 40 year period. It took this movement with a certain kind of media savvy to grab all kinds of people’s attention to get all kinds of people including conservatives to talk about what rising inequality means and whether we ought to do something about it.

LAWTON: I’m intrigued by the amount of religious participation there is in the Occupy movement just as there is in the Tea Party movement. There were a lot of Evangelicals that had some, you know, still do, that have some affinity with the Tea Party. On the religious left there’s a lot of participation, not just with chaplains, which they do have in the, in the movement but, but in, in talking about some of the language and helping behind the scenes with some of the strategy and also in some of the rhetoric that’s being used. You see, you hear things like greed is evil. That’s a moral kind of a calculation you know and inequality and the gap between the rich and poor, that’s wrong, it’s evil. Those are all moral issues and that’s the influence I think of the religious community. African American clergy have joined in on this and want to get more involved and they see it as an extension of the Civil Rights movement.

DIONNE: And this is the 25th anniversary of the Catholic Bishops’ very important statement at the time, economic justice for all. And some of us at Georgetown went back and were talking about this and in a lot of ways that statement from 25 years ago parts of it could be a manifesto for this movement demanding economic justice.

ABERNETHY: But do you hear in all this something that not only protests what we have, but that goes on to say that we ought to change it, fundamentally change the system, the political system, the economic system. Is that in there, too or not?

DIONNE: Well I think the I mean the Occupy movement has been very consciously not about particular demands, some people have criticized them for that, although I think historically a lot of movements change things not by putting up a program but by saying we need to move in a different direction. But I think a lot of these movements are more reformist than they are uh revolutionary.

ABERNETHY: Right.

DIONNE: There’s clearly a lot of frustration with Congress and the way Washington is working, but I still think even some of the more radical elements of some of these movements um are not looking to overturn the system, they just think it needs to be a whole lot better than it is.

ABERNETHY: Yeah. Meanwhile there’s been this amazing campaign on the Republican side for the nomination for president and in that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism comes up as you pointed out Kim in your piece. Is that going to hurt him?

ECKSTROM: I think it will be a challenge for him to get through the primaries. If he can make it through the primaries and gets the nomination and can get to the general election I think it’ll be less of an issue. But I think at this point in the last couple weeks what we’ve seen is that it’s not his Mormonism that’s Romney’s Achilles heel, it’s the conservative distrust of him. And you’ve seen it, you know, Romney has stayed fairly stable in the polls, he never gets above 20, 23% and everyone’s looking for a Plan B or another option but they’re not really falling in love with any of them so I think his problems are more about him and less about his Mormonism right now.

ABERNETHY: What’s been the role of religious conservatives in the republican campaign?

DIONNE: Well I think religious conservatives have been fragmented in this election. I think they kind of wanted to rally behind someone and it’s, their situation is much like that of other conservatives in the party, te- including Tea Party conservatives where a potential champion, for example Rick Perry, who soared in the polls after he got into the race and looked like he might be the person who could unite Tea Party conservatives, religious conservatives and other kinds and then had a whole series of problems and then he sort of collapsed again. Michele Bachmann was a favorite of some of them for a while. Now Newt Gingrich has picked up some of that support. So think that, you know, this election has been different say than the last one where a very large number of religious conservatives rallied behind Mike Huckabee some I think for anti-Mormon reasons but other simple because Huckabee was an Evangelical leader.

LAWTON: Well, but I think that it took them a while last time around for them to rally behind Mike Huckabee, which was one of his frustrations and that’s been the case this time around too that they haven’t been able to coalesce around one candidate and they are very important in this primary season as we’ve said. Last time around about 40 percent, more than 40 percent of all GOP primary voters were Evangelicals and in early states like Iowa and South Carolina that goes to 60 percent. And so if want to be the GOP candidate, you’ve got to get a significant number of those votes. And yeah, there’s something about that they haven’t done around Mitt Romney. Some of them like Ron Paul so-

DIONNE: It’s very interesting the first three states, you’ve got Iowa where the caucuses have a very high white Evangelical participation, then you’ve got New Hampshire which is a somewhat more secular and quite a bit more secular libertarian state and then you go back to South Carolina next which is again a place where Evangelicals are important.

ABERNETHY: 2011 was the 10th anniversary of 9-11, what do we know about U.S. attitudes toward Muslims and how has that changed over this time, Kevin?

ECKSTROM: They haven’t really gotten much better. I think that’s the simple answer. You saw this year about the hearings that Kim mentioned about radicalization on Capitol Hill, the brouhaha we’ve seen in the last couple weeks over a Muslim reality TV show. A lot, the anti-Muslim sentiment actually creeped up a little bit after Bin Laden’s death in May. A lot of people said well if we get rid of Bin Laden maybe people will feel better about Muslims and actually the opposite happened. So things continue to be tense I think what’s been really interesting to watch in the last couple weeks has been this kind of counter backlash to the Muslim reality TV show where Lowe’s, the hardware store, pulled its ads from conservative pressure and now everyone’s threatening to boycott Lowe’s ‘cause they, they don’t think that the show is getting a fair shake and that Muslims aren’t getting a fair shake. So there is a bit of sympathy I think to some degree for Muslims being under attack.

ABERNETHY: What do you make of the efforts going on in many states to whip of fear of Sharia, of Islamic law?

DIONNE: Well you know I think one of the disconcerting things that’s happened in attitudes towards Muslims is that overtime it’s become more of a partisan and ideological issue, which was not the case in the days immediately after 9-11, partly because President Bush made some very strong statements about Muslims being Americans, being our brothers and sisters but now you’ve seen this issue become more politicized so it tends to me in very conservative states, paradoxically often states with very, very small Muslim populations. But I think in a way that we are as a country trying to deal with Muslims as a new reality in our country in much the same way that we dealt with Catholic immigrants a hundred years ago or more as a new reality in our country. My colleagues at Brookings and the Public Religion Research Institute did a poll this year and we found overwhelming support for religious freedom and the rights of minorities – 9 Americans in 10 – but on particular questions about Muslims nearly half were uncomfortable with mosques in their neighborhood, nearly half thought that Muslim and American values are incompatible. A lot of the same things that are said about Muslims were said about Catholics, that Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign power, that they weren’t fully democratic. I take some of these numbers in a more positive way that you see quite a bit of movement toward toleration and embrace, but still some holding back I think it’ll take a long time. Younger Americans are much more open than older Americans.

LAWTON: And so much of many Americans views on Muslims and Islam have been tied to the war on terror. And so that’s an additional complication. That also then brings in foreign policy and lots of politics as well. So that’s been a complicating factor that many American Muslims are frustrated about – that they’re broad-brushed with a whole bunch of people around the world that they have nothing to do with.

ABERNETHY: The last U.S. troops from Iraq have been coming back. What do you make, what do you all make of the welcome that they’ve received and people’s feelings generally about the end of the Iraq War?

LAWTON: I’ve been surprised at the fact that prior to our entry into the Iraq War in the religious community this was a huge debate. Is this a just war? Should we be doing this? There were protests in the streets and now that’s it’s winding down I haven’t heard as much moral conversation from ethicists and religious leaders about what did it all mean now that it’s done and what did we leave behind? People were talking about do we have an ethical responsibility to that country and I don’t hear it being framed in that way and I found that interesting.

ECKSTROM: And I think it’s a very different reception of the troops coming home from Vietnam obviously got and I think a lot of people are happy about that. They’re proud that their veterans are coming home, but I’ve been surprised at how muted the reaction has been. I think along with what Kim has been saying it’s almost like you don’t know that it’s happening out there.

DIONNE: You know I’m struck by how on the one hand the reaction is very different than the reaction of World War II where we had a very clear victory, we announced it. On the other hand it’s also not like a Vietnam where we saw folks evacuated by helicopter from the roof of the embassy. I think Americans decided that they wanted to get out of this war several years ago and the Obama Administration decided that the only way to get out was in a slow and responsible way. So I’m not surprised by the quiet reaction, but you’re absolutely right, it is a reaction to the veterans and an appreciation is so much greater now. We did a terrible job as a country in sort of honoring the service of Vietnam veterans. It took us years to honor what they did for the country.

LAWTON: And we have seen a lot of religious involvement in working and ministering to some of these returning troops and you know not only some of those who were wounded physically but emotionally and spiritually, those wounds linger. And so I have seen a lot of religious energy put into that as well.

ABERNETHY: Kevin it’s been almost 10 years since the terrible scandal broke about the Catholic sex abuse of children. Where does that stand? Bring us up to date on that. What happened this year?

ECKSTROM: Well it had a couple things. One you saw this process enter the criminal justice system, the secular system. So you had a grand jury in Philadelphia indict a top church official for shuffling priests from one place to another. In Kansas City you had the first bishop ever criminally indicted for not reporting a known abuser. The other interesting thing that happened was it spread, in a way to Penn State. You know the church has long argued that it’s not just a church problem, that it’s a problem in schools and in universities and in boys scouts and wherever else. And this was the first big sort of example of that we saw. But what was what I think most interesting was mid-year the bishops put out a long anticipated report on what they called the causes and contexts of this problem, what went wrong basically. And they couldn’t really come up with a simple, you know, decisive answer. What they did essentially was the whole culture got off track in the 60s and the church got really swept up in that. And that’s sort of the big problem that they could point to, but there’s no single cause that they could find.

LAWTON: And the headlines on that were “Woodstock Made Me Do It” made them do it, and of course that’s not what the church wanted for PR.

ABERNETHY: And the media.

LAWTON: Well that was the media too, but still that was what some people took away.

DIONNE: And of course the problem on the scandal was not the 60s culture. I think what it created was a crisis of authority inside the church because a lot of the anger was not simply at the abuse itself as much as there was anger at that, but how long it took for the church to come to terms with it. But again the Penn State thing, the Penn State events suggest a very similar pattern of institutions being slow to respond.

ABERNETHY: What about immigration and the churches? What’s going on there, what’s been going on this year?

ECKSTROM: Well in Alabama you had one of these get tough immigration laws that was passed that took effect and the United Methodist bishop of Alabama.

ABERNETHY: And Arizona.

ECKSTROM: And in Arizona, but the Methodist bishop in Alabama said it is the meanest immigration law in the country. There were great fears that it would penalize churches for assisting immigrants whether they’re legal or not. Now certain parts of that law were thrown out and they’re on appeal so the churches right now are in the clear. But there’s a great concern in the religious community that their hands are being tied in their ability to minister to immigrants of one stripe of another.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up, but I don’t want it to run out without asking you as you look back on the year, what was the most intriguing story that you saw or one that got the least attention that should’ve gotten a lot more. Who wants to begin? E.J.?

DIONNE: What I was much taken by the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission on Peace and Justice’s critique of the economy that made you wonder is Pope Benedict going to show up at one of these encampments of Occupy Wall Street? Because it was a very tough critique of capitalism. It didn’t say get rid of the market system, but it raised a series of moral questions and I’d like to think and this has happened in other traditions as well, I’d like to think that we can have, at the end of this downturn and serious moral conversation about how you create and just and competitive economic system.

ABERNETHY: Kevin what do you, what do you see?

ECKSTROM: I was really struck by the sale of the Crystal Cathedral in Southern California. You had this institution that went bankrupt and I think it’s a microcosm of sort of the shifts that are going on in the American relig–

ABERNETHY: And It was a symbol of—

ECKSTROM: Protestant dominance. Yeah. And it’s symbolic of the shifts that are going on in the American religious landscape where white mainline aging Protestants are literally losing ground, literally, to Catholics primarily fueled by Hispanic immigration, it’s fascinating.

ABERNETHY: Kim?

LAWTON: I was struck by the number of religious successes I saw in the pop culture world. We had several books on the New York Times bestseller lists about heaven and hell including one that created a huge amount of controversy within the Evangelical community by an Evangelical pastor who had a more expansive view of who’s going to hell. We saw the Book of Mormon on Broadway sweeping the Tony’s. We had a movie called Courageous by a church in Georgia making over 33 million dollars and that’s still making money every day. And you know just stuff like that and of course who could forget Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos quarterback who make kneeling in prayer a sort of cultural phenomenon, generated a lot of controversy but still got a lot of people talking about the public display of religion.

DIONNE: And he won a lot of games.

LAWTON: Well…

ABERNETHY: Our time is up I’m sorry to say. Happy Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all our viewers and to Kevin Eckstrom, E.J. Dionne and Kim Lawton. I’m Bob Abernethy.

DEBORAH POTTER: As the US Conference of Catholic Bishops gathered in Baltimore this week, the group’s president, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, said the sex abuse scandal at Penn State “reopens a wound” for the church. To discuss the parallels, we’re joined by Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service, and Kim Lawton, managing editor of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. Kevin, let me start with you. What are the parallels, as you see them, between what happened at Penn State and the long running sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church?

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Well in both cases you had people who should have known better who made bad decisions and often times the worst part of this whole scandal is not necessarily the abuse, I mean as bad as that is, that’s horrible, but it’s the cover-up that really gets people upset. And you saw that with bishops who would move priests from one place to another and you saw it from people at Penn State who knew what was going on but didn’t report it to the police and kind of, at least from the outside it looks like they tried to keep it quiet.

POTTER: And they moved locations. They allowed Jerry Sandusky to have access to a satellite campus and it’s sort of like the same thing you are mentioning with the priests being just moved even though you know something’s going on. It’s that sort of effort to protect the institution that seems to take over, doesn’t it, Kim?

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): Right and that’s what a lot of people are noticing is this, you know, circle the wagons, protect the institution at the expense of the children. So that was one of the parallels. I think one of the differences though is that the institution at Penn State moved, in a certain sense, belatedly, but they moved to hold some people accountable. And some of the victims’ rights groups that I’ve been talking with this week were frustrated that the church itself hasn’t always seemed to do that. Or, if there were repercussions it comes from the state as we saw in the Kansas situation where it was the state that did the indictment.

POTTER: What do you think the church really has to teach on this subject? Are they in a position to be advising others on how to deal with a sex abuse crisis like this?

ECKSTROM: Well to their credit, the church has actually done a fairly comprehensive study with John Jay College in New York about the roots of the problem, how it developed, how it got worse, how it was ignored. So they do have some sort of statistical data to offer on this is what we’ve learned and these are the steps that we’ve taken to try to prevent this from happening again. So, Archbishop Dolan says, you know, we learned the hard way how this got out of hand and to the extent that we can help other institutions deal with this, you know they’re happy to do it.

LAWTON: It’s interesting because when they first put those new guidelines together in 2002 even back then the bishops were saying they hoped that they could be a model for other institutions and of course, they point out that the church isn’t the only place where sex abuse takes place. And so they’ve been hoping all along they could be a model, but you know, they haven’t always lived up to the guidelines and to the things that they’ve done. And Archbishop Dolan acknowledged that this week and he said we’ve been hesitant to offer advice. He said people in glass houses and all of that. But, indeed, he feels that they do have some resources to offer for how to deal with these situations.

ECKSTROM: Right and the big challenge for the church and for Penn State is it’s one thing to have policies and guidelines, but if you can’t implement them. And that’s been the big problem for the church is getting the bishops or the individual dioceses to implement these policies and if you can’t do that, the policies are sort of meaningless.

LAWTON: I saw somebody this week said that while the church may have some things to teach, the church might also been able to learn some things from Penn State in terms of how they handled it by holding people accountable.

POTTER: And moving quickly to do that at a higher level than it has been the case in the Catholic Church up until now, at least.

LAWTON: Right and you know, also, I think for the church, a lot of people think this is the church. These are people who speak for God, who are God’s representatives on Earth and so in a sense they should be held to maybe a higher standard than Penn State or some other secular institutions.

POTTER: Well although if you talk to some people at Penn State, you know, football is a religion and there are some parallels there in terms of the high regard in which a football coach, for example, might be held. And therefore is in a position of authority and power in order to be able to really manipulate young people.

ECKSTROM: Right. The big difference to remember here though is that Penn State has the ability to fire people.

POTTER: And did.

ECKSTROM: And did. And it’s much harder to do that in the Catholic Church.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: It’s often called the Emerald Isle—and with good reason. Ireland is as green as ever. But the country that once was a bastion of Roman Catholicism has changed. The vast majority of people here still call themselves Catholic—87 percent on the most recent census. But many of the most faithful church-goers in Ireland today aren’t even Irish. This Sunday Mass in Limerick is said in Polish for some of the thousands of immigrants who poured in during the economic boom of the past decade. But it’s hard to find an Irish congregation this packed, and especially this young, in bigger cities.

PATSY McGARRY (Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Irish Times): People still identify themselves as culturally Catholic even though they no longer go to Mass or go to confession. You’ll see them at first communions, you’ll see them at confirmations, and you’ll see them at funerals. They’re taking very much an a la carte view to the practice of their religion.

POTTER: As recently as the 1970s, almost 90 percent of Irish Catholics went to Mass at least once a week. Today, the number is closer to 25 percent. And in some parts of Dublin, just two or three percent of self-described Catholics regularly go to church.

(speaking to Irish woman): Did you grow up Catholic by chance?

WOMAN: Yes.

POTTER: Do you go to Mass now?

WOMAN: Not really that much. No, not much at all.

MAN: Weddings and funerals, things like that. That’s basically it.

POTTER: Those who do go for special occasions like this prayer service in County Galway can’t help but notice that the people in the pews have changed.

REV. TONY FLANNERY (Association of Catholic Priests): They’re old. That is the main thing. When you look down at a congregation from the altar now you’ll see mostly gray heads. The young people, the under 40s, have largely deserted the church in Ireland now.

POTTER: Irish priests are aging, too—on average, they’re well over 60. Many are still working into their 80s, and replacements have slowed to a trickle. At Maynooth, the country’s only Catholic seminary, the number of students being ordained to the priesthood has never been lower.

REV. HUGH CONNOLLY (President, Maynooth Seminary): Twenty years ago you could have been certainly over 20, maybe not that unusual to have a year where there would have been 30. Now we’re more likely to have somewhere under 10. Six, seven, that kind of thing.

POTTER: In the diocese of Dublin, not a single priest will be ordained this year—or next year. It’s been a stunning decline for a church that once virtually ruled the country.

McGARRY: It was a huge organization. It was like an alternative state within the state. It ran our schools, it ran our orphanages, it ran our reformatories, it ran most of our hospitals, and so therefore you can get an idea of the scale of what the Catholic Church was. It was an alternative society within Ireland.

POTTER: The Catholic Church here in Ireland saw its influence begin to wane with the social upheaval of the 1960s. But in the past twenty years, two factors combined to accelerate its decline: sudden prosperity and the shocking revelations of sexual abuse. The worldwide recession stopped the so-called Celtic Tiger in its tracks, but consumerism had already weakened the church’s hold on the Irish people, who had become far better educated over the previous 40 years.

McGARRY: They questioned their faith, they questioned the right of bishops to tell them how to live their lives.

POTTER: The body blow, however, came from the clergy abuse scandals that hit harder and closer to home in Ireland than anywhere else. Here, almost everyone knows someone who’s been affected.

FIRST WOMAN: Maybe we as older people did a lot of covering up. Also, we were very much into appearances, putting our best foot forward, saying the right things.

SECOND WOMAN: I think with all the scandals that have been revealed, it certainly made people think more and question a lot of things that were happening.

PEADAR CREMIN (President, Mary Immaculate College): Those who had a shaky faith now had an excuse for walking, because why would you go to the church every Sunday morning to hear somebody who potentially is in league with child abusers, and I think many people used the backlash against child abuse as a basis for saying, “Do I really want to subscribe, do I want to contribute, do I want to be part of that type of a church anymore?” I think at the heart of our problem is in a sense the church has lost its moral authority. The church has lost its right to speak out on issues.

POTTER: The abuse was a betrayal of trust, Pope Benedict acknowledged in a pastoral letter last year to Irish Catholics, his first-ever apology for the sexual abuse of children by priests. This year, during an extraordinary liturgy of lament and repentance at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, the Archbishop of Dublin and Boston’s Cardinal O’Malley prostrated themselves, asking God and the victims for forgiveness. But it hasn’t been enough.

CREMIN: People are still waiting, I think, for the kind of great atonement and the kind of fundamental change that will convince them that things have changed. There isn’t enough evidence yet that things have fundamentally changed.

FLANNERY: It’s a crisis, and it’s not one of the future. It’s one of right now. It’s quite extraordinary an organization as big and as ancient as the church that we cannot face a crisis that’s right at our doorsteps and begin to talk realistically about it.

POTTER: The kind of change Father Flannery advocates would be dramatic.

FLANNERY: Opening up the ministry of the church to lay people, to married people, to priests, to women. In other words, not confining it to the male celibate priesthood as we’ve had in the past, because clearly that is not working now, so we have to begin to think in different ways, but the Vatican is increasingly forbidding any discussion on that.

POTTER: Still, there are small signs of renewal. Some parishes now have lay people in positions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Kevin Mullally is a full-time pastoral worker. Sheena Darcy works for the International Eucharistic Congress.

SHEENA DARCY: I’ve seen young people come back to know God’s love. I’ve seen young people get more involved in the church.

KEVIN MULLALLY: They’re also searching for basic things, belonging and love and, you know, acceptance and tolerance, and all those elements go together in a spirituality.

SHEENA DARCY: Yes, there’s that acknowledgment that what happened was dreadful. It was absolutely dreadful. However, we do also, we do need to move on.

POTTER: Whatever happens, the Catholic Church in Ireland has already changed irrevocably.

McGARRY: I do believe Catholicism will continue, will survive in Ireland, and I do believe the clerical church will not. That doesn’t mean there won’t be priests, of course there will be, but I don’t think as a force it will ever again, in my lifetime certainly, will never have the power it had when I was a child. And I think that’s a good thing because it abused its power massively, and it became, I mean, a dictatorship in a democracy which was answerable to nobody.

CREMIN: I still have the view that what’s happening is actually something quite healthy, because the church we will end up with will be a church of committed, passionate, and dedicated people who will live the gospels rather than talk about them.

POTTER: That undoubtedly means the Irish Catholic Church will be smaller, but it may be, in a very different way, stronger.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops gathered in Seattle this week for their annual spring meeting. A key part of the agenda was reviewing sex abuse prevention policies they adopted in 2002. The bishops passed minor revisions but said overall the guidelines have “served the church well.” Still, there are lingering questions about compliance and accountability.

Joining me now is Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program. Kim, are the bishops really following those 2002 guidelines?

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, they say the majority of bishops are following the guidelines, but there are a couple who are not, and that has lead to some pretty high-profile scandals—one in Philadelphia, another one most recently that, last couple weeks in Missouri, where the local bishop had to apologize for a priest that was arrested on child pornography charges.

ABERNETHY: And whether a bishop has to follow those 2002 guidelines is up to the bishop. There’s no way that the other bishops can make him do that, right?

LAWTON: Well, they are nonbinding, and the bishops say that they don’t have the authority to discipline or impose penalties, that only the pope can discipline a bishop. So therefore they say this has to be part of the “fraternal correction,” and it is sort of voluntary.

ABERNETHY: The Southern Baptists, Southern Baptist Convention, also gathered this week in Phoenix and took steps to make their denomination more diverse, more ethnic diversity. It elected an African American from New Orleans as a first vice-president, on track to become perhaps the president of the Southern Baptist Convention in a year.

LAWTON: Perhaps.

ABERNETHY: Perhaps. So there’s something going on there.

LAWTON: Well, they are trying to reach out, I think. There has been some apologies for racism in the past. But they are trying to reach out as well. There was some concern that they have been declining in baptisms and even a slight decline in membership. They’re still the largest Protestant denomination, of course.

ABERNETHY: Sixteen million, is it?

LAWTON: Sixteen million.

ABERNETHY: I was thinking about this Libya thing and the Congress putting pressure on the president. There’s a relationship, isn’t there, to a religious tradition?

LAWTON: Well, the political debate is whether or not the president has the authority to authorize and continue the military effort in Libya without congressional authorization, and the just war tradition also says that in order for military action to be just it has to have the sanction of the proper authorities, and so there is that moral connection that the political debate is also sort of tied to, and there’s been another debate in the religious community I’ve been watching as well. I’m seeing increasing numbers of religious conservatives raising concerns about the Libya action. Many of them had been supportive in other military efforts, but on this one raising concerns on moral issues, economic moral issues, raising questions about whether or not it’s moral to spend that much money—over $700 million dollars—on this effort.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: A highly anticipated report on the causes of the clergy sex abuse crisis in the US Roman Catholic Church was released this week by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The lead researcher said no one factor was responsible for the actions of the priests. Both celibacy and homosexuality were ruled out as causes. Instead, researchers found that priests were influenced by societal changes during the 1960s and 1970s, what they called an increase in “deviant behavior.” Several victims groups denounced the report, saying it does not place enough blame on the bishops who covered up abuse.

We discuss the report and the reaction to it with Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service, and Kim Lawton, the managing editor of this program. Kim, is it the case that the report has something in it to make everybody unhappy?

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): Well, a little bit. When this crisis here in the United States really hit a boiling point in 2002, a lot liberals in the church said, well, the problem is this all-male priesthood and enforced celibacy, and that’s creating the problem. A lot of conservatives said it’s homosexuality and gay priests and that’s the problem. And this report said it’s not either one of those. But the report did say the social upheaval in the 60s and 70s, and there were critics who didn’t like that sort of blame-it-all-on-Woodstock idea. The report said that in seminaries priests weren’t being trained to handle the new sexual mores of the United States at that time, and there was a lot of stress, and that generated the problem, but that makes a lot of critics frustrated because they say it makes it a sociological problem and not a systematic problem and a spiritual problem within the Church.

ABERNETHY: And the fact is, Kevin, the abuses happened, whatever the causes.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): That’s right. Whether it’s gay priests or celibacy or anything else, the fact is that this happened within in a very particular institution, the Catholic Church, that was incapable for 50 or 60 years of really handling this problem and dealing with it in an effective way, and a lot of times what they did was they shuffled it off to the side, or they said, oh, well, this isn’t really that big of a deal, or we can reassign this problematic priest somewhere else, and this— the way that this problem was handled did not happen in the same way in, say, public schools or boy scouts or whatever. So I think the bishops to their credit and the church to its credit gets—should be acknowledged that this is the widest study that’s ever been done on child abuse, child sexual abuse, but they don’t really quite go far enough, I don’t think, in saying how the church’s own responsibility contributed to it.

ABERNETHY: And there was nothing in the report, was there, about the bishops who moved around the people who were committing these terrible acts?

LAWTON: Well, the report does say that the bishops were part of the problem in that they didn’t deal with it or they spent more time focusing on the priests and not the victims who were being abused. But what the report doesn’t do is then come up with suggestions for dealing with that, for punishments, or for mandatory things that the bishops have to do when this happens, and that’s a frustration.

ABERNETHY: Do they have to report to law enforcement?

LAWTON: If it’s a state law, they do. The guidelines set up by the bishops encourage the local dioceses to report allegations to the authorities. But again, it’s not mandatory, it’s not binding and there’s no enforcement mechanism.

ECKSTROM: I think one of the big numbers, sort of one of the hidden numbers, actually, in this report was that only 14 percent of these cases over the 60-year period were turned over to law enforcement. That means that 86 percent of cases were handled internally in the Church, and the big criticism of the Church has always been that they don’t know how to handle it internally. And they say, oh, trust us, we’ll take care of it, don’t worry about it, but they’re not referring these to law enforcement, which is what a lot of people say they should be.

ABERNETHY: Is the problem over? To what extent has it peaked and gone away? There was something in there about …

LAWTON: Yeah, the report says it was a historical problem, and there certainly has been a decrease in the number of cases being reported. However, we’ve seen, we’re seeing right now in Philadelphia, in the archdiocese of Philadelphia there’s a situation going on right now where a local grand jury has suggested that 37 priests who were accused, with credible allegations of abuse, were allowed to remain in their posts, and the lay review boards that have been set up to help the Church monitor this—they were shocked to hear that. So there are clearly still a lot of issues.

ABERNETHY: Kevin, very quickly. Is it over or not?

ECKSTROM: Last year, in 2010, there were just seven cases reported of abuse that was alleged to have occurred in 2010. So, in that case, you are not seeing hundreds of cases of abuse, but what’s problematic for a lot of people is that the Church is not reporting any cases, and they are not releasing the names of accused priests that might encourage of other victims to come forward.